Saturday, May 27, 2006

Poor Lil' SGI

The IT press is in a tizzy over the Chapter 11 filing by SGI. This is strange to me because if ever there was a company whose impending demise made perfect sense it was SGI. I should say that I, like almost all other folks who have anything to do with tech, love SGIs in much the same way that we love beautiful sports cars. In much the same way as we cannot afford beautiful sports cars, however, we usually can't afford SGIs. There used to be a lot of companies that had to have the capabilities that only SGI could offer, but that is no longer the case. Unfortunately for SGI they have maintained their marvelous brand image so even when we want a good graphics system they aren't the first place we look (because even if we could afford it, we feel like we can't). My sports car analogy is apt, I think, because there are brands of cars that you would never even consider because you have in your mind that they are expensive. The same is very true when we consider systems for purchase. I'll be sad if SGI goes away completely because I had always hoped that one of our projects might actually require something that cool, but now I may never get the chance. *sigh*

Australia

I just got back from a trip to Australia and it was outstanding. I figured I would have a really tough time with the 14 hour LAX to Sydney plane trip since I had only been on domestic flights previously, but for some reason I found it easier to fly the longer trip. I adjusted much faster on this trip than I have on coast-to-coast US domestic flights. The only thing I can figure out is that maybe it has something to do with the fact that I was able to sleep so much (8 hours) on the plane.

I also had a much easier time with driving on the other side of the road, which I thought would give me fits. It was a little hair-raising when I had to turn right or left the first time, but after that it was no problem.

One of my Australian friends there referred to his country as the "51st state" and it certainly did seem close to the US in a lot of ways, but there were some things that really made it seem like a foreign country. First and foremost was all the Rugby on TV. I thought I was confused after watching it but then asking an Australian about it and having them go into the differences between Rugby League and Rugy Union and Australian Rules Football was even worse. That said, I really think I enjoy watching Rugby more than American Football. It moves very fast and that is good for my short American attention span. Because of this short American attention span I had a much harder time watching Cricket, which is like Baseball, but slower.

Friday, May 12, 2006

Electricity

We had power outages today and yesterday that lasted way longer than we are used to (you know, you expect little 20 second things when there is a storm, but the outages today lasted 6 or 7 hours and we had a few yesterday that lasted a couple of hours). Talk about taking things for granted.